Real-time measurement error mitigation for one-way quantum computation

Abstract: We propose a quantum error mitigation scheme for single-qubit measurement errors, particularly suited for one-way quantum computation. Contrary to well established error mitigation methods for circuit-based quantum computation, that require to run the circuits several times, our method is capable of mitigating measurement errors in real-time, during the processing measurements of the one-way computation. For that, an ancillary qubit register is entangled with the to-be-measured qubit and additionally measured afterwards. By using a voting protocol on all measurement outcomes, occurring measurement errors can be mitigated in real-time while the one-way computation continues. We provide an analytical expression for the probability to detect a measurement error in dependency of the error rate and the number of ancilla qubits. From this, we derive an estimate of the ancilla register size for a given measurement error rate and a required success probability to detect a measurement error. Additionally, we also consider the CNOT gate error in our mitigation method and investigate how this influences the probability to detect a measurement error. Finally, we show in proof-of-principle simulations, also considering a hardware noise model, that our method is capable of reducing the measurement errors significantly in a one-way quantum computation with only a small number of ancilla qubits.